Posts Tagged ‘Alpha Technology’

It seems that MAT (Mining Asics Technologies) has “resumed shipping” or more like actually started shipping their Scrypt ASIC miners to customers, there is even a user review of their 250 MHS Excalibur miner. Interestingly enough there is also a discussion going on that the MAT Scrypt ASIC miners and the Alcheminer Scrypt ASIC miner use essentially the same hardware. If this is true the it is interesting who is the actual manufacturer of the hardware when even the timing of the two companies in releasing ans shipping hardware also pretty much coincides. We can speculate that either Alcheminer or MAT has developed the hardware and one company is the OEM supplier for the other company, though there is no official information linking the two companies… or the actual designer and manufacturer of the chips could be a completely different company.

Another Scrypt ASIC manufacturer, namely Alpha Technology has still not started shipping their miners. The company did not manage to meet their initial target to start shipping in September and has announced that they should be able to do it in October. Now, at the end of the month we still haven’t seen an announcement that the company is ready with the actual miners and will start shipping this month, so we can assume that the target for shipping has slipped to November. Eve though about the company has shown some photos of their ASCI chips earlier this month they are apparently not ready with the complete solution yet. Alpha Technology like many other Scrypt ASIC manufacturers that do or did take pre-orders does not like much to keep their customers up to date on how things are progressing, even after failing to meet their promises, so status updates are still rarely released.

KnCMiner is apparently also shipping again some more Titan Scrypt ASIC miners to customers after they have recently promised to ship all of the remaining Batch 1 pre-orders in the next three weeks. As a result we are seeing some more significant increase in the total network hashrate and difficulty of the Litecoin network with the Titans performing best when mining high difficulty coins such as LTC. That however does not contribute that much to making customers of the company happy as people are still not satisfied by how KNC is not keeping their promises.

Alpha Technology has promised their customers that they will ship this month, October, after the company was unable to deliver by the end of September already. Today the pictures of the first produced Viper ASIC chips have been posted by the company and now they need to start assembling them into the Scrypt miners. And although no date is yet mentioned when they will be able to start shipping Viper Scrypt ASIC miners, it now seems realistic to believe that there is a chance that the first units may start shipping before the end of the month. Alpha Technology has also promised to “also be quickly releasing a video demonstrating our chips hashing as an update to the community”, so we are now waiting to see the first actual Viper unit in action.

Specifications wise the smaller 50 MHS Viper Scrypt ASIC miner and the bigger 250 MHS Viper Scrypt ASIC still look OK compared to other mining hardware already available on the market, though at the prices that they were originally sold you can already buy more powerful hardware in terms of hashrate. The situation with the time required for the Vipers to ROI is very similar to that of the situation with KnCMiner Titan miners – not very likely that it will ever happen, unless the price of LTC does increase quite a bit over the current level. So it will be very interesting to see what will happen with the company if/after it ships all of the pre-ordered miners – will they reduce the prices and continue making and selling the Vipers to new customers, will they be working on new generation of chips or…

Now, if you are thinking that the situation with Alpha Technology and their Viper Scrypt ASCI miners still not shipping, what should you think about the situation MAT (Mining Asics Technologies). According to the new information released by the company they have received their first ASIC chips at the beginning of August and by the end of the month and early September they were already releasing videos of some of their products hashing. On the company’s website we’ve seen an estimated shipping date announced as 15.09.2014 for the smaller Scrypt ASIC miners and “estimated shipments Q3 of Year 2014” for the first batch of devices from the more powerful units.

On 19.09.2014 MAT has released a news update stating that the after some delays the “shipping for our first customers will start on 26.09.2014”. On 08.10.2014 there was another news update saying that the company has already started shipping the previous week, however they have apparently found a software bug that they need to fix and are stopping the shipments meanwhile with a promise to maybe start shipping again next week. Now, why would they need to stop shipping if it is a software bug, it has been a while since all of the more serious ASIC crypto miners can be software (firmware) updated by the user. Furthermore how and why they find a software bug after a bit over a month of testing that they should have already been done since they got their first miners working. It all seems like they are buying some time as nobody has yet reported of receiving a miner from them, and if somebody did get a unit if it had a serious problem that needed manual intervention from MAT that would mean the device need to be sent back to them for a fix.

As you would expect from an ASIC manufacturer the communication with customers is lacking, we are used to seeing this, even though this is clearly not the right way to go and treat your customers that have paid you thousands up front. No wonder that people are not happy, but then again we are seeing a similar situation with other companies such as Alpha Technologies or even KnCMiner, not to mention BFL. Clearly if companies in this business want to keep their customers happy and returning for more they need to be more open and responsive to customer questions, not to mention that they should not give promises that they might not be able to keep. Keeping your customers in the dark, not keeping promises and delaying your hardware without a detailed and on time explanation is clearly not the right way to do business in the crypto currency world.

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